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Pluto’s Increased Entourage

July 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

NASA and ESA released this great picture from the Hubble Space Telescope this week, showing tiny Pluto’s entourage of moons, imaged twice with a week apart. Three of these were already known – Charon, Nix and Hydra – but Hubble managed to spot a fourth one in there too. It has a diameter of somewhere between 13 and 34 km, roughly 100 times smaller than the best-known moon Charon. The new moon been given the preliminary name P4, which will be replaced by something a little more meaningful in due course. Very neat!

With this, I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks. No blogging, here or elsewhere.

Image: NASA/ESA/M. Showalter

 

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.Astronomy: Here’s One We Made Earlier

April 7, 2011 By

Can’t believe .Astronomy is over for another year, but here I am, at Heathrow, on my way home. Our final day yesterday was pretty fun-packed, and apologies to those on twitter who really didn’t need to hear quite so much about kittens or David Hogg. There were some great talks, but I first wanted to list some of the hacks that people presented on Wednesday morning.

I was impressed with what people produced, and .Astro definitely seemed more techy to me than in previous years. We awarded some prizes to hacks we particularly liked in technical and artistic categories – just like in figure skating, cause who doesn’t love figure skating?

In no particular order, here are some links I like. This is by no means a complete list….

Jose Enrique Ruiz recorded a set of pencasts – I’m not sure what the correct verb for this activity is – basically got people to talk about and draw their work with a magicFu pen. It looks super cool.

Amanada Bieberauer put together an arrangement and backing singers for her Pluto song and got Heidelberg’s Markus Poessel to record a music video to go with it. It’s already a bit of a hit I understand, full info and credits on the dedicated site. Markus also produced another .Astronomy trailer, like last time. I loved Boris Häußler‘s video showing exactly how many devices we used to bring down the college wifi network – and ABBA. All the videos are embedded below.

On the tech side, Eli Bressert, Tom Robitaille and Matthew Graham [updated 13/04]produced some code that scrapes Arxiv and displays on one nice page the paper’s title, authors and abstract (like on astro-ph), but also a list of tables and figures for easy downloading. We may never need to read words again. I look forward to seeing this hack up and running.

Our top hacking prize went to Jon Yardley, Haley Gomez, Ed Gomez and Rob Hollow for their ChromoTone project, which lets users explore astronomical images in sound. Top marks for coming up with the chord structure to represent different wavebands and the insertion of the occasional blue note. You can’t go wrong with that.

Pamela Gay, Stuart Lowe, David Hogg and Phil Marshall came up with Astrotaches – an html5-based site that allows users to draw on images as a way of tagging interesting objects. A kind of Galaxy Zoo on speed.

And there were many other fun and useful projects that I hope to hear more about in months to come. And here are the videos…

 

 

 

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Astronomer kills planet, writes book

January 23, 2011 By

The body of science, as it’s collected in the ever-growing volume of dry, formulaic journal articles, has little space for context. It certainly has no room for sentiment. Yet, as science writers know well, it’s the human backdrop to scientific progress that brings science to life and gives it its inspirational power. Astronomer Mike Brown‘s book on his search for large solar system bodies that ultimately led to the now infamous demotion of Pluto, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, is a beautiful example of this.

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Not a planet, still interesting

February 7, 2010 By

Despite Mike Brown‘s best efforts, Pluto is not dead (yet). These cool new images of the tiny non-planet taken with the Hubble Space Telescope show that it is by no means a boring lump of icy rock. When comparing these images, taken in 2002-2003, to a previous set dating back to 1994, scientists noticed some striking changes. This would suggest that Pluto, just like many bodies in the solar system, shows seasonal activity and all kinds of interesting chemistry as it moves along its looong orbit around the Sun.

Image: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute)

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